Monday, 22 August 2011

Two Mango adventures

Two Mango adventures for the price of one this week. On Saturday I raced in Germany, and on Monday I collected some more stock.

Rütenbrock 2011
Again a very enjoyable competition in Rütenbrock, for which I have to thank the Bentlage brothers who put a lot of work into organising it. It's a 55 km ride from here to their village, so I rode there first and back again afterwards. I made this film, starting on the way there. My intention had been to have a camera facing forwards as well as the one backwards, but unfortunately the forward camera stopped working:

Jan Eggens made a film from the side of the track:

I'm still waiting for official results at the moment (they'll appear here). All I know at present is that in the one hour race, Daniel Fenn won with an amazing 44.8 km/h average, Peter was 9th with just short of 38 km/h, and that I was (I think) 15th out of 37 competitors with an average of about 36 km/h. Lots of fun.

Today I went to collect some more racks for the shop. I thought a bit about this. Pulling the trailer behind the Mango obviously slows it down. It's not all that aerodynamic and a bit like pulling a parachute. This is difficult to calculate for. However, the effect of the extra weight on the return trip is also very easy to notice and the online calculator shows that the effect of the weight alone takes about 5 km/h off my speed or, if you like, makes the journey 15% "longer". However, the round-trip of 75 km still took well under three hours, which isn't so bad.

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